Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Reading as one of the many who sought comfort in books.
From a century closer to us (but the author of The History of Reading doesn’t care for these arbitrary
conventions, and invites him into Chapter Six) another eclectic reader, the genial Oscar Wilde, makes his
appearance. We follow his reading progress, from the Celtic fairy-tales given to him by his mother to the
scholarly volumes he read at Magdalen College in Oxford. It was here at Oxford that, for one of his
examinations, he was asked to translate from the Greek version of the story of the Passion in the New
Testament, and since he did so easily and accurately the examiners told him it was enough. Wilde
continued, and once again the examiners told him to stop. “Oh, do let me go on,” Wilde said, “I want to
see how it ends.”
For Wilde, it was as important to know what he liked as it was to know what he should avoid. For the
benefit of the subscribers to the Pall Mall Gazette he issued, on February 8, 1886, these words of advice
on what “To Read, or Not to Read”:
Books not to read at all, such as Thomson’s Seasons, Rogers’ Italy, Paley’s Evidences, all the Fathers,
except St Augustine, all John Stuart Mill, except the essay on Liberty, all Voltaire’s plays without any
exception, Butler’s Analogy, Grant’s Aristotle, Hume’s England, Lewes’ History of Philosophy, all
argumentative books, and all books that try to prove anything.… To tell people what to read is as a rule
either useless or harmful, for the true appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of
teaching, to Parnassus there is no primer, and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning. But to
tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the
University Extension Scheme.
Private and public reading tastes are discussed quite early in the book, in Chapter Four. The role of
reader as anthologist is considered, as collector of material either for oneself (the commonplace book of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the example given) or for others (Palgrave’s Golden Treasury), and our author
very amusingly shows how concepts of audience modify the choice of an anthologist’s texts. To support
this “micro-history of anthologies” our author quotes Professor Jonathan Rose on the “five common
fallacies to reader response”:
• first, all literature is political, in the sense that it always influences the political consciousness of the
reader;
• second, the influence of a given text is directly proportional to its circulation;
• third, “popular” culture has a much larger following than “high” culture, and therefore it more
accurately reflects the attitudes of the masses;

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• fourth, “high” culture tends to reinforce acceptance of the existing social and political order (a
presumption widely shared by both the left and the right); and
• fifth, the canon of “great books” is defined solely by social elites. Common readers either do not
recognize that canon, or else they accept it only out of deference to elite opinion.
As our author makes quite clear, we the readers are commonly guilty of subscribing to at least some, if
not all, of these fallacies. The chapter also mentions “ready-made” anthologies collected and come upon
by chance, such as the ten thousand texts assembled in a curious Jewish archive in Old Cairo, called the
Geniza and discovered in 1890 in the sealed lumber-room of a medieval synagogue. Because of the Jewish
reverence for the name of God, no paper was thrown away for fear it might bear His name, and therefore
everything from marriage contracts to grocery lists, from love poems to booksellers’ catalogues (one of
which included the first known reference to The Arabian Nights), was assembled here for a future reader.
Not one but three chapters (Thirty-one, Thirty-two and Thirty-three) are devoted to what our author calls
“The Invention of the Reader”. Every text assumes a reader. When Cervantes begins his introduction to
the first part of Don Quixote with the invocation “Leisured reader,” it is I who from the first words
become a character in the fiction, a person with time enough to indulge in the story that is about to begin.
To me Cervantes addresses the book, to me he explains the facts of its composition, to me he confesses
the book’s shortcomings. Following the advice of a friend, he has written himself a few laudatory poems
recommending the book (today’s less inspired version is to ask well-known personalities for praise and
stick their panegyrics on the book’s jacket). Cervantes undermines his own authority by taking me into
his confidence. I, the reader, am put on my guard and, by that very action, disarmed. How can I protest
what has been explained to me so clearly? I agree to play the game. I accept the fiction. I don’t close the
book.
My open deception continues. Eight chapters into the first part of Don Quixote, I am told that these are
the extent of Cervantes’s telling and that the rest of the book is a translation from the Arabic by the
historian Cide Hamete Benengeli. Why the artifice? Because I, the reader, am not easily convinced, and
while I don’t fall for most tricks by which the author swears truthfulness, I enjoy being pulled into a game
in which the levels of reading are constantly shifting. I read a novel, I read a true adventure, I read the
translation of a true adventure, I read a corrected version of the facts.